Another day, another chapter in the great GNOME-dissolution epic. This time it involves Debian, the base for a ridiculous number of other distros, finally deciding to switch the GNOME-shell for xfce as the default desktop environment. While like any Linux distro this can easily be changed, it’s an interesting development in the ongoing user backlash towards GNOME’s current direction.

There are issues with the workflow in GNOME

Developer Joey Hess, who announced this move in a Debian mailing list, mentioned that it was possibly only a temporary move. Evaluation to revert this change will occur from DebConf next August all the way until Debian 8.0 goes through freeze. Specific criteria the team will be looking at is the number of people installing GNOME anyway, the state of support for those with visual impairments and if they feel the interface provides the best experience for both new and veteran users.